The trip to Ketzia’s cabin never got easier no matter how many times Grace made the drive. The first stretch was bad enough—three hours spent headed straight north, all the while progressing from one level of wilderness to the next. Then, once you’d left all civilization behind, it was right into the woods with you. After half an hour of traveling along that bumpy gravel road, swarmed by trees on all sides, Grace always found herself feeling that someone else had suddenly appeared in her car. At any moment, she might peek at her rear view mirror and see a face smiling back at her.
Even today, she shuddered thinking about it. Maybe being scared alert like that was a good thing, though. This road wasn’t exactly one you could zone out while driving along. If you let yourself daydream for a few seconds, you’d be caught off guard by a sudden twist in the path or a crater in the gravel. This was the last place Grace wanted to crash or break down, so she stayed vigilant throughout this whole final stretch of the trip. She kept her eyes focused on the road, which thankfully stopped her from glancing at her mirror too often.
This forested section of the drive could feel longer than the rest of the trip combined, despite taking only an hour to reach Ketzia’s cabin. Grace wasn’t sure which order of operations was worse: ending with this gravel road or starting with it. For today, at least, the time passed quicker than usual and the cabin’s clearing soon came into view. Maybe the trip felt shorter because Grace couldn’t bear waiting any longer to talk to her old friend.
And maybe Ketzia felt the same.
The woman was already sitting on her porch steps when Grace arrived, and she watched the car pull up and park at the center of the clearing. Ketzia had covered up her usual tank top with a washed-out denim jacket, but that was just for show. Grace knew she didn’t get cold with all that magic constantly flowing through her.
Grace parked, grabbed her overnight bag from the back seat, then began to walk toward the cabin. Ketzia jumped off the porch steps and met her halfway, with a bony bird flying ahead of her. The skeletal phoenix Lesh flew to Grace and perched on her shoulder. His afternoon feathers were just coming in, so it wouldn’t be long before he started glowing bright.
“I wasn’t expecting you to be the one begging me to visit," Ketzia said through a wide smile.
“Maybe you heard it as begging because you were praying for it,” Grace said. “But I told you why I was in a rush to come up here. We needed to talk—face to face.”
Ketzia’s smile turned into a scowl as she pointed a finger toward Grace’s feet. A spark shot out of her finger and struck the ground near Grace, bursting into a tiny firework with a loud bang. Grace didn’t flinch; she’d gotten used to Ketzia’s magic over the years, and had even predicted this little outburst.
“Not a chance in hell,” Ketzia said. “You’re not starting us off on work talk. I know if I tell you what you want to know right away, you’ll be out of here as fast as you were last time. Nah, I’m not saying a word until we’ve had a real conversation.”
Grace sighed, but Ketzia’s assumption was a fair one. So, she held up her duffel bag and looked her friend in the eyes.
“I’m not going anywhere. Not today, at least,” she said. “And if you don’t say a word, how are we supposed to have any kind of conversation? I’ll be stuck here forever.”
“I don’t see the problem,” Ketzia said. “Bring those girls with you, too. Turn this place into your new office.”
“For starters, how about you let me inside?” Grace said. “The rest of us get cold standing outside this time of year.”
Ketzia snatched Grace’s bag from her and started walking toward her cabin. Grace wasn’t sure if she should interpret that action as Ketzia being a courteous host or as her making sure Grace couldn’t leave until she gave the bag back.
Either way, Ketzia didn’t need to worry. What Grace had told the girls back home hadn’t been an outright lie. She did want to spend time with her friend.
She just couldn’t leave until she learned the truth.
☆☆☆
Ketzia called the start of a new year “cider season.” Since she brewed her own all year long, what she really meant by cider season was “cider drinking season.” She was ready to drink as soon as the sun went down, and at this time of year, the sun went down early.
By the time she and Grace sat down for dinner, Ketzia had already finished one bottle. The second went down during dinner, then she emptied the third as they cleaned up. Maybe having a guest had put her in a more jovial mood, but Grace remembered this pace being relatively standard for Ketzia. On the other hand, she had barely finished one of her host’s homebrews before they sat down on the cabin’s long couch. Between the cider and the flames roaring in the fireplace, Grace felt warm enough to ditch her sweater.
Of course, the glowing bird on her shoulder probably contributed to the heat, too.
Ketzia asked Lesh to give her and Grace some space, albeit in rougher words than those, and the little phoenix vanished into the ether. Maybe Ketzia had sent him away so Grace could cool off, or maybe she did it so the two of them could talk by themselves. Maybe one was a convenient excuse for the other.
Out of nowhere, Ketzia laughed.
“Lesh kept saying how similar you and Adah are,” she said, “but I never saw it. Now that I got you sitting here, though, I’m getting flashbacks to when she and I stayed up sipping cider like this.”
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“Adah’s got a good head on her shoulders, but I don’t know how similar our personalities are,” Grace said before partaking in the aforementioned sipping.
“Nah, she totally takes after you,” Ketzia argued. “Like a third parent. The way she worries about her teammates. The way she holds back before talking—you both do the same pause. I bet if you timed it, you’d match each other down to the millisecond.”
“Maybe you’re just hallucinating me onto her,” Grace said. “You know, because you missed me that much.”
“Ah, yeah,” Ketzia said in a teasing tone. “That must be it.”
“Adah surprises me too much—impresses me too much—for us to be the same,” Grace went on.
“Okay, okay,” Ketzia said with a chuckle. “That’s right. That’s the difference between you and her.”
“And what’s ‘that?’” Grace asked.
“You don’t like to take credit for anything,” Ketzia said. “I don’t know why, but you like to fade into the background and act like you had nothing to do with anything that’s going on.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ketzia laughed through her words, really amusing herself now. “Like when you sent those kids up here. They didn’t have a clue what was really happening. Like it was a coincidence that they had to come up here right after they got their asses kicked. You never told them our little training camp was a contingency plan—something to keep them on their feet in case they lost that contest.”
“Meeting you was a good opportunity for them,” Grace said. “Are you saying I set it up out of pity? It’s my job to help them succeed.”
“Oh, relax,” Ketzia said, leaning back into the couch cushions. “I’m saying it was a good idea. It kept them from moping about, and the timing was right for them. Those kids were lucky to have someone looking out for them back then, but you wanted to act like it happened by accident. You wanted to drop them off and pretend like that opportunity just fell into their laps.”
Grace sighed. She had clipped her hair up today; she found it easier to manage and more comfortable than a hair tie during a long drive. Unfortunately, re-bunching her hair didn’t have the same meditative effect for her that retying it did.
“I don’t need an award for helping them out,” she said. “I did it because I wanted to. That’s all.”
Ketzia must have started to feel her cider a little bit, as she swung her legs onto the couch and stretched out until she was lying with her head against the armrest.
“I guess that’s how you are,” Ketzia said. “You were always helping me out, too.”
“I don’t remember that. If anything, you usually did the opposite of whatever my advice was. I certainly never told you to treat the old Secretary the way you did.”
Ketzia waved her arm above her head. Grace swore she saw a faint trail of smoke follow in the wake of her hand.
“I don’t mean magical girl stuff,” she said, “I mean back in the day. In school, in track. You were an upperclassman—you should’ve put a loudmouthed kid like me back in my place. Most people would’ve tried to stay ahead of me, to never lose a race. But you put all the effort you should’ve put into training into helping me instead. Almost like you gave up. You’re weird like that.”
“You were better than me,” Grace said with a shrug. “Or would be, with a little bit of work, and I knew how to get you there. I found it more fun to see how far you could go than to try myself. I knew you could take it further than I could.”
“And that’s what I don’t get!”
“There’s no deeper meaning,” Grace said. “I just wanted to see how much you could win. How fast you could be.”
The arm holding Ketzia’s fourth bottle dangled off the side of the couch, while her other arm gesticulated wildly in the air. She wasn’t drunk yet, Grace knew, but this much alcohol was enough to make her lazy. Grace would have to cut her off soon, or Ketzia might not want to sit upright for the rest of the night.
“That’s why Michel crushes on you, too,” her friend said out of the blue.
“Here we go again.”
“He doesn’t know how to handle you,” Ketzia continued. “He’s used to people who either ignore his problems cause they like what they see, or who hate his guts before he even opens his mouth. But you treat him like a horse.”
“A horse?”
“Yeah, maybe the horse has got a temper, or he’s bad at turning on his left, but he always gets a sharp break and blitzes the straight. You just see his strengths and weaknesses and work around them. There’s no judgment, more like… an evaluation. You’re an enigma to him for that. It’s been that way since high school. The only reason he never asked you out is cause he’s scared you’ll turn him down. He thinks you’re too good for him.”
“You’re playing all the classics tonight, aren’t you?” Grace said. Then she opted to make a bigger dent in her own cider. Ketzia joined her, finished hers out, and set the empty bottle down on the cabin floor.
“Twenty years is plenty of time to get to know somebody,” Ketzia said. “Those girls of yours haven’t figured it out yet, but they will. There hasn’t been a day that you haven’t spent thinking about them. Half your brain thinks about them, and the other half tries to make you look like you aren’t.”
Most of tonight’s rambling wasn’t anything new for Ketzia. Grace had heard it all before. If she had spent most of high school trying to help Ketzia succeed in track, Ketzia had spent that same time playing matchmaker for her and Michel. Why it had to be that guy, Grace would never understand. She had never expressed any interest in him—he just happened to hang around her a lot. Then again, she had never expressed interest in anyone at their school. Maybe Ketzia had simply latched onto whatever boy she’d seen Grace with most often.
Although she’d heard all her friend’s theories about Michel before, she’d never heard Ketzia talk about Adah and the other girls like this. Maybe Ketzia had found another means through which to psychoanalyze Grace, now that she’d met those girls.
“Any other insights, Doctor?” Grace said.
Ketzia laughed and, to Grace’s surprise, sat up to look her friend in the eyes.
“Nah,” she said, “that’s all for today’s session. I do have a question, though.”
“Let’s hear it.”
Ketzia scooted herself across the couch until she was just a cushion away from Grace.
“What do you want at the end of this?” she asked. “What’s gonna let you stop thinking about those girls, or about somebody like me, and start thinking about yourself?”
Grace only needed to think about her response for a moment.
“I want them to do everything they want to do as magical girls,” she said. “Then I want them to retire and spend the rest of their lives someplace where all their friends can visit them without driving half a day.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Ketzia said.
“I’m sorry then. Right now, that’s my answer.”
Ketzia stared at her a while longer, her eyes glowing in that odd way they sometimes did now that she was Untethered. Was it something she did on purpose, Grace always wondered, or did her magic do it on its own?
Eventually, Ketzia squeezed her eyes shut as if bracing for an impact.
“I guess we gotta talk about those kids,” she said, “if that’s the future you want for them. So, what did you wanna know?”
Now it was Grace’s turn to stare at her old friend.
“I want to know what happened during that training camp,” she said. “Those girls changed while they were here. I’m not talking about motivation or how they fight, either. The whole way they thought about their jobs changed. Something changed them—something they won’t tell me. But you will.”
When Ketzia opened her eyes again, the glow was gone.